Software-Defined

When we deploy Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), either hyperconverged or disaggregated, we have to configure the networking part. Usually we work with Dell hardware to deploy Storage Spaces Direct and the one of the switches supported by the Dell reference architectures is the Dell S4048 (Force 10). In this topic, we will see how to configure this switch from scratch. ...

This week, in part of my job I deployed a Storage Replica between two S2D Clusters. I’d like to share with you the steps I followed to implement the storage replication between two S2D hyperconverged cluster. Storage Replica enables to replicate volumes at the block-level. For my customer, Storage Replica is part of a Disaster Recovery Plan in case of ...

When you deploy VMware vSAN in the vSphere environment, the solution comes from several tools to monitor, find performance bottleneck and to troubleshoot VMware vSAN issue. All the information that I’ll introduce you in this topic are built-in to vCenter. Unfortunately, all vSAN configuration, metrics and alerts are not available yet from HTML5 board. So the screenshots were taken from ...

Few months ago, I have written a topic about the next gen Microsoft management tool called Honolulu project. Honolulu provides management for standalone Windows Server, failover clustering and hyperconverged. Currently hyperconverged management works only on Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) versions (I cross finger for Honolulu support on Windows Server LTSC). I have upgraded my lab to latest technical preview ...

StarWind Virtual SAN is a Software-Defined Storage solution which enables to replicate data across several nodes to ensure availability. The data are mirrored between two or more nodes. Hypervisor can be installed in the StarWind Virtual SAN nodes (hyperconverged) or separated from hypervisor (converged). StarWind Virtual SAN is easy to use and provide high performance. Moreover, StarWind provides pro active ...

Today I release a special Christmas gift for you. For some time, I’m writing a PowerShell script to generate a Storage Spaces Direct dashboard. This dashboard enables you to validate each important setting for a S2D cluster. I decided to write this PowerShell script to avoid to run hundred of PowerShell cmdlet and check manually returned value. With this dashboard, ...

This week I deployed a Nutanix cluster based on VMware ESXi 6.5u1. I wanted to share with you how to re-image the Nutanix nodes to VMware ESXi. Usually Nutanix blocks are shipped with nodes imaged on AHV. So, you have to re-image the Nutanix nodes to the wanted hypervisor (Hyper-V, ESXi or KVM). In this topic we’ll see how to ...

This week I worked for a customer which had issue with his Storage Spaces Direct cluster (S2D). When he restarted a node, Windows Server didn’t start and a bluescreen appeared. It is because the operating system disks were plugged on S130 while Storage Spaces Direct devices were connected to HBA330mini. It is an unsupported configuration especially with Dell R730XD. In ...

Usually, I’m not speaking about news but only about technical details. But with the release of Windows Server 2016 1709, lot of misinformation have been written and I’d like to show another way to look at this. First of all, it is important to understand what happened to Windows Server 2016. Microsoft has modified how Windows Server is distributed to ...

Earlier in the week, I published a blog post about Honolulu project and how in the future, this tool can ease Windows Server management. Today I introduce another management tool for Storage Spaces Direct (hyperconverged or disaggregated). This tool is called StarWind Manager and it is developed by … StarWind. StarWind Manager is currently in preview version and for the ...